Major Project

For my major project I decided to pair up with one of the students from an ecmp 355  Jaclyn Zaba. I’ve known Jaclyn for about two years and she has a special interest with students with special needs and has really moved forward with this love by beginning the process and learning sign language. In our project we decided to make a collaborative video on sign language this way I would be teaching her about video digital editing equipment and software and I could learn a more about sign language. This was a type of mentorship/partnership where we both learned from each other. The tool we used is called a flip camera, it is a easy to use digital camera that I believe would be ideal for elementary school children it is small and has a limited number of buttons so that it is small enough for little hands, the new equipment was not that challenging and even the automatic software the downloaded as the videos were uploading was easy to navigate. For our editing software I decided on Windows movie maker as it is the least intimating and since we both had PCs I believe it was the better choice as it was accessible to us at any time. Through the process I walked Jackie through everything step by step, showed her how to perform different skills like inserting clips, transitions, music, credits, overlays and then splicing the clips to make them fit the purpose of the video. She was a great learner although at times I became a little frustrated as I knew I could do it in half the time by myself. But it was a collaboration so we had to mesh our two visions into one coherent piece which we were both proud of.  I think working through this process was a great idea as we both got to use new equipment and I was able to teach a fellow student a new skill that she will hopefully take with her into her teaching profession and embrace with her kids as I know I will. The flip video is a tool which would be great to have in the classroom as it easy to use and easy to upload and any teacher with a blog would find it quite useful. I have also noticed how much my editing skill have improved over the years and I’m happy that this will be my final note after leaving university…

So sit back and enjoy…Sign language 2.o